Building His Own House

It's hard not to make assumptions. But an exuberant moustache and thick-rimmed specs askew on the face of a 20-something Brooklyn white guy don't exactly scream hot young house artist. The man behind the decks of the sensationally blissed out tunes of Octo Octa also shirks the usual suave talk that seems often to pour from the mouths perched above the suited bodies associated with the club scene. “I'm just being who I am,” Michael Bouldry-Morrison says, one of the crème-de-la-crème of the house label 100% Silk. “I think dance music and club nights are in their best form when there is no sheen. I'm not really making a conscious choice to look the way I do.”

Bouldry-Morrison is a busy man, with a seemingly endless run of club shows in his native US and around the world, not to mention his fairly consistent recording output, but he makes time for a chat from Manhattan's Red Bull Music Academy studios. It's an indicative sign of how things are trekking along in Bouldry-Morrison's career; in two words, quite nicely. “I'm trying to work every day on tunes to some degree,” he says. “I'm not one who can bang out a tonne of songs in a matter of hours. It takes me a long time to get tunes done and even then I throw out probably 95 per cent of what I work on. I try to hop onto ideas I have as soon as possible, which can typically mean I'm humming something into my phone at work.”

His output as Octo Octa over the past few years has been a pretty steady one, with two EPs and an LP released in consecutive years since 2011, as well as a forthcoming LP pegged to land in the coming months. Considering Bouldry-Morrison grew up in a fairly typical family circle in Chicago and New Hampshire, with parents who listened to alternative radio, on top of a self-admitted aversion to house music, it's a pleasant surprise to find the place he's arrived at.

“Octo Octa originally started as an IDM project that I did alongside a dance band I was in with a friend,” he explains. “After that ended I wanted to work on more straightforward tunes and at the time, having recently gotten into house music – I hated it for a long time, but then something clicked and I felt like I understood a 4/4 groove – I started to make what I make now.”

The 100% Silk label has connotations of a red velvet rope for house artists; boutique in the way it handpicks and showcases talent, the label, headed up by Amanda Brown of LA Vampires and Not Not Fun Records, boasts Ital, Fort Romeau, Maria Minerva and Jonas Reinhardt on its books, as well as his Australian tour cohorts Magic Touch and Bobby Browser. With international club shows and big wigs taking note, it's a good place for Bouldry-Morrison to show off his decks right now, and it's allowing him exposure in places where house music is for Europeans like ketchup is for Americans. “I've been [to Europe] twice now and I'm going back the summer. I love playing there!” he enthuses. “I actually have crowds that will come see me play. People will also start dancing sooner than in the US, which is always appreciated. The US is still pretty conservative when it comes to dancing, but it feels like that attitude is finally going away. I have not played [in Australia], but I can't wait! I think most of us [on the 100% Silk label] want to help each other out. Damon [from Magic Touch] helps me out a tonne with shows. Amanda is always helping with whatever she can. There's a lot of support that I don't think you'd always find in other places.”